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Gingrich 2012? Going, Going, Gone

By Ross Douthat February 1, 2012 12:59 amFebruary 1, 2012 12:59 am

Joe Skipper/ReutersA voter exited a polling place in the Park Ranger/Ocean Rescue headquarters in Boca Raton, Fla. on Tuesday.

Last week, New York magazine’s John Heilemann pointed out a deep truth about Newt Gingrich’s peculiar presidential campaign: The very media elite that Gingrich delights in hammering has actually been in his corner all along. The press likes a horse race; the press likes outsize personalities; the press favors an underdog; and the press even takes a strange sort of delight in being ruthlessly attacked.

Of course most political reporters don’t want Gingrich in the White House. But they’ve had every incentive to keep him in the headlines and overrate his odds of defeating Mitt Romney for the nomination.

Tuesday night’s Floridian drubbing won’t change those incentives, so we can expect a last burst of media chatter about how Gingrich could still recover, ride a wilderness campaign to a Super Tuesday comeback and fight Romney tooth and nail all the way to the convention. But chatter is all it will be. For Gingrich and his media enablers alike, the dream died in Florida – and here are four reasons why.

If Gingrich can’t compete in Florida, he can’t compete nationally.

To date, all of the Republican primary contests have been held in smallish states with distinctive demographic profiles. This made it possible to play up the significance of Gingrich’s convincing South Carolina victory, while downplaying Romney’s New Hampshire win as an independent-abetted, only-in-New-England fluke.

But Florida’s primary was closed to independents, Florida’s electorate was as conservative and Tea Party-friendly (though not as evangelical-heavy) as South Carolina’s and Florida’s large senior population once looked like it would give Gingrich an edge. If the former speaker couldn’t even come close to beating Romney in such relatively favorable terrain, it’s hard to see how he can hope to compete with him anywhere outside the Deep South.

The anti-Romney vote isn’t as big as Gingrich likes to think it is.

As the Florida polls turned against them, Gingrich’s campaign began hinting that Rick Santorum should drop out of the race and give Gingrich a clear shot at consolidating conservatives against Romney. If Santorum weren’t in the race, one of Gingrich’s campaign chairmen in Florida told CNN on Monday, “we would clearly be beating Romney right now.”

But as it turned out, Romney received as many votes as his two nearest rivals combined. And more importantly, pre-primary polls showed that without Santorum in the race, Romney would still have led Gingrich by a wide margin – as much as 16 points, according to an NBC/Marist poll. The fact that a majority of Republicans still have reservations about Romney, in other words, doesn’t mean that a majority would ever vote for Gingrich.

Romney hammered Gingrich in the debates, and then carpet-bombed him with negative advertisements. 68 percent of the ads that ran in Florida were negative spots attacking Gingrich, and Romney’s only positive ad was a Spanish-language spot that aired 15 times in total. While this gloves-off approach may have tarnished Romney’s image with swing voters, it helped reassure the many conservatives who were attracted to Gingrich because they want a no-holds-barred fighter for the fall campaign.

As John Podhoretz wrote on Monday in the New York Post, Florida was a test of Romney’s mettle: “The clean-cut Boy Scout Ken-doll candidate from Massachusetts needed to show his fellow Republicans that he could be mean, tough and merciless on the attack — that he could take it to his rival and best him.” Consider that mission accomplished.

In truth, the idea that the former speaker’s skills as a debater would give him a significant general-election edge over President Obama was never particularly plausible. Still, many Republican primary voters seemed to be believe it: The promise of a Lincoln-Douglas-style showdown with the president has been one of Gingrich’s more effective rhetorical flourishes, and his showstopping performances in South Carolina were crucial to his upset victory.

But it’s hard to see how Gingrich’s Master Debater reputation recovers from his poor showings in the debates in Florida. Even if he stays in the race long enough to get another crack at Romney, voters will always remember that he can be bested – that if you prick him, he might just bleed. Once lost, an aura of invincibility is an awfully hard thing to regain.

Without his debating magic, Gingrich doesn’t have any cards left to play. He won Herman Cain’s endorsement in Florida, but it didn’t help his cause. Sarah Palin had his back, but it didn’t seem to matter. Sheldon Adelson funded his ads, but Romney still massively outspent him. Santorum could have dropped out, and Gingrich still would have lost by double-digits.

There’s nobody waiting in the wings to help him, no endorsement or donation that can change the fundamentals of the race. If he keeps going now – and there’s every reason to think he will – he’ll be pinning his hopes on a deus ex machina. Every realistic path leads only to defeat.

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Weekly pieces by the Op-Ed columnists Charles Blow and Ross Douthat, as well as regular posts from contributing writers like Thomas B. Edsall and Timothy Egan. This is also the place for opinionated political thinkers from all over the United States to make their arguments about everything connected to the 2012 election. Yes, everything: the candidates, the states, the caucuses, the issues, the rules, the controversies, the primaries, the ads, the electorate, the present, the past and even the future.